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Melbourne's harbor is the first known home of a new species of dolphin: the Tursiops Australis or "Burrunan dolphin."

Kate Charlton-Robb and her colleagues at Monash University in Melbourne, studied dolphin skulls from a number of museums and conducted detailed analysis of DNA, and found that Tursiops Australis is clearly a different animal.

"These dolphins that are now a new species had characteristics of some of the common bottlenosed dolphins, but also, the Indo-Pacific bottlenosed dolphins -- it had some characteristics of those," Charlton-Robb explained. "But it also had some different characteristics that were not found in either of those two species."

There are about 150 "resident" Burrunan dolphins in Australia, to Charlton-Robb's knowledge. She says more research is needed to find out if there are other populations in the area: "In order to protect them, we need to be able to continue the research and potentially see if there are other populations in this region that are sustainable."

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